CSI Comes to Second Life

By special guest writer Tammy Nowotny, October 19, 2007

I am being a little presumptuous writing about CSI: NY. I have never watched any of the CSI shows not even CSI:Bógótá on the Spanish channel. I do have my TV on quite a bit when I am playing Second Life, but usually it is tuned to CSPAN or perhaps to Nascar or some other sporting event. Nevertheless, here I am.

On October 16, I attended a "Gridtalk" presentation on Dr Dobbs Magazine's SL island, all about CSI: NY's upcoming foray into Second Life. Detective Mac Taylor, aka Gary Sinise, is going up to the Second Life grid to go undercover to investigate the murder of the fictional "Paris Hilton of Second Life." This scares me a little since I happen to be the Paris Hilton of Second Life (smarter and prettier— but not as rich— as the real world's Paris Hilton.) She is a green haired drama queen who is the most popular person on the grid and who (apparently) gets whacked by a rival who wants to take over her identity.

This seems a little unrealistic: fame is much more decentralized in SL than in RL (RL="Real Life"). Everyone can be a Second Life star. Even though there is plenty of jealousy and rivalry in SL, you can usually get away from it pretty quickly, since the Grid is a large, relatively underpopulated, and very forgiving place, with plenty of room for you to get away from your enemies (as long as you only have a few of them, at least.) The scope for violence in SL would be pretty limited, in any case: you can't really kill anyone. I have only made one serious enemy in Second Life, and that rivalry was resolved after a little while when she got bored with Second Life and started playing World of Warcraft instead (a game with much more violence and much more rivalry, as well as a more stable software platform.) And, in any case, she wasn't all that bad a person, anyway: she was just a harmless drama queen.

The Second Life side of this CSI:NY story arc is being handled by the amazingly versatile Electric Sheep Company, metaverse consultants extraordinaire. (I have a storefront on Electric Sheep's ShopOnRez e-commerce site.) They are building a CSI island where avis can wander around and play with a virtual crime lab. Anthony Zuiker, the producer of CSI (who is also an entertainer in his own right), will also be wandering around the game, and he will leave clues lying around. There will be a contest where the winner will be the person whose explanation of the crime, based on the clues, best matches Zuiker's official explanation.

Without further ado, here are a couple of videos about CSI:NY entry into Second Life. Oh, actually, I do have some further ado. Sorry, but I simply must thank KD Griffin of the WatchingCSI.com web site for a great article whose URL was:

http://www.watchingcsi.com/csi-new-york-heads-to-second-life-2/

https://youtu.be/3-ZmjA7GCzQ
(One inaccuracy in this video: when you fall from a great height in Second Life you don't die. You simply get up and dust yourself off. And in the clip, the victim only falls about 10 meters, which is nothing.)

Electric Sheep will also be rolling out a new Second Life client called "the OnRez" viewer, which has been designed for less technically oriented users than Linden Labs' standard client. In a recent press release, this was somewhat confusingly referred to as a simpler version of Second Life: "[Anthony] Zuiker stressed that the CSI: NY virtual world in Second Life will be geared for the CSI fan rather than the early adopter, with shorter download times and an avatar of Zuiker to walk visitors through the virtual Manhattan." The techies at the Dr Dobbs session I attended were concerned that this meant that CSI was building a whole new, dumbed-down grid just for the show. However, it turned out that all this meant was that they will be starting new members out with a standard Zuiker avi on a CSI island which will be an integral part of the Grid. The new members will be born in the shape of Zuiker, and they will go through a special orientation process, but otherwise they will be no different from any other Second Life resident. (In all fairness, the standard birth avis are pretty ugly anyway. Even uglier than Zuiker who is a rather homely middle-aged dude. And the standard orientation process , which I have suffered through five times, stinks.)

I saw a few screen shots of the new Viewer.OnRez client. As a landowner (and a frequent builder) I was glad to see that they have simplified the Building process while also getting rid of the "Build" button on the easiest to hit corner of the main screen. If you hit this button by mistake, you will (if the technology works as intended, which is not always the case) "rezz" (or, in Muggle terminology, drop) a cubical plywood box in the ground. The elimination of this Build button means that newbies will no longer be mistakenly leaving as many plywood boxes all over the place.

Speaking of newbies, we are expecting a record influx of new Second Life members thanks to CSI. I highly recommend becoming a paying member. It costs US$72/year, but the weekly stipend (along with the access to technical support and the other perks) makes up for that. I also recommend getting and spending some Linden dollars (the in-game currency).

See also:

SecondLife.com
October 4, 2007 New York Times article (registration and/or payment may be needed)
Official Second Life website
Timo's Adventures in Second Life
Newt Gingrich's and Mike Gravel's Adventures in Second Life
Merry Wootmas!
Timo's Paris Hilton page

Detective Mac Taylor (Gary Sinise) with a Second Life avatar

[October 24, 2007] I skipped a lage part of Game 1 of the World Series to see the CSI:NY episode, called "Down the Rabbit Hole." (And yes, there was a rabbit in it.) The number of this episode in the CSI:NY canon is 04.05.

I won't give away too much of the plot: I will just say that they have a reasonably interesting hypothesis for how and why the Paris Hilton of Second Life got whacked. Three or four other people get killed during the episode, but one of the "Vics" survives a couple of commercial breaks and is able to give Detective Mac and crew some useful information before finally croaking. I enjoyed CSI:NY: it is a silly but highly amusing show about impossibly beautiful and absurdly well-equipped NYPD detectives who solve complicated crimes with amazing ease. This is not a gritty police procedural: it makes Miami Vice look like the original black and white Dragnet.

The SL action all took place in voice chat, which is a understandable piece of poetic license. There were many technical and cultural inaccuracies, most of which can also be justified as poetic license. The biggest cultural goof is that they portrayed SL in this story as a very patriarchal place where tyrannical men amuse themselves by manipulating harems of submissive females: actually the ladies run SL and the men are mostly drones with detachable penises. (This goof did make sense in terms of justifying a key plot point, however.) The biggest technical goof is that the CSI:NY producers left out the ubiquitous floating nametags, which meant that (just like in the real world) Mac doesn't know anyone's name unless he either recognizes them on sight or someone tells him who they are. The funniest goof was the virus which spawned an infinite number of replicas of Mac's avi and also briefly crashed the crime lab's local area network, forcing Mac to shout out the now-popular SL catchphrase: "LOG OFF! NOW!" (The LAN was back up after the commercial break.) I don't know about the new OnRez viewer, but the regular Linden Lab client doesn't propagate viruses like that from the Grid to your local network.

One geographical inaccuracy I should mention: the episode ends with a cliffhanger, which takes place at a luxury apartment house at 4325 West 57th Street in Manhattan. This address, if it existed, would be in one of the parking lots at Giants Stadium.

We were all expecting a huge influx of new Second Life Residents after the show, and we probably will have some in-migration eventually— but right after the broadcast the grid was actually less crowded than usual.

I just knew something was going to break right after the show. It wasn't the grid itself which broke: it turned out to be the Viewer On Rez file servers which went down. I visited one of the many CSI:NY orientation islands right after the show (using the regular Linden Lab viewer) and it was devoid of newbies, although some of us oldbies did come over. It was a great looking island, with rich but quick-loading detail (such as the authentic hexagonal asphalt paving tiles seen in the pic below.)

(The Red Sox, by the way, did just fine without me: they won 13-1.)

Extra! [October 25, 2007] Electric Sheep file servers did get up and running a little while after the CSI:NY broadcast, and eventually I managed to download and play with the OnRez viewer. It worked not much better— but certainly no worse— than the regular viewer. Textures rezz quicker and more reliably— but moving your avatar around is harder. Once I crashed and— instead of seeming to be stuck in one spot as usual— I seemed to be merely running and running and running, soon running so far away that I couldn't even see the ground anymore, just the horizon line. But when I logged back on, I materialized in my front yard, right back where I was when I crashed.